Alfred R. Mele is the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He has made significant contributions to action theory and attempts to understand autonomy, free will, rationality, and akrasia for more than two decades. A magna cum laude graduate of Wayne State University, Dr. Mele earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he was a teaching fellow, in 1979. He then joined the philosophy faculty of Davidson College as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 1991. Named Vail Professor of Philosophy at Davidson in 1995, he accepted his present position in 2000. Dr. Mele is the recipient of the 1982 Richard M. Griffith Memorial Award in Philosophy, six National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, the Centenary Fellowship of the Scots Philosophy Club, and a Florida State University Graduate Teaching Award. He has held grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and the Alfred P. Sloan foundations. A former president of the North Carolina Philosophical Society, he is a member of the boards of editorial consultants of the American Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophical Studies, the advisory board of Consciousness & Emotion, and the editorial board of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. He is the author of some 150 articles published in scholarly journals, the editor or co-editor of four books, including (with Mark Timmons and John Greco) Rationality and the Good, which was published last year by Oxford University Press. Dr. Mele is also the author of six other books, including Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control (1987), Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behavior (1992), Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (1995), Self-Deception Unmasked (2001), Motivation and Agency (2003), and, most recently, Free Will and Luck, which tackles the major theoretical challenges to the thesis that we sometimes act freely and was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. He is currently working on a new volume entitled Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will.